Richard Morgan-Ash was surprised himself. It was still the middle of the night, and he wouldn't have though the local authorities in a rural area would have been able to mobilize such an extensive set of police roadblocks on such short notice. They'd been stopped twice already by roadblocks, on the first two roads they'd taken. They knew from their contact over his cell phone with their colleagues still in Minnesota that the chronoletic impact had happened right after midnight. The exact time was impossible to pin down because the impact scrambled time around itself. By the clocks in the underground facility, it had happened at exactly 12:11:08. But the time at the impact site itself might very well have read somewhat differently, to anyone in a position to observe. Whether anyonewould be in a position to observe such an impact, from "inside," so to speak, was a hotly contested issue among the scientists in The Project. A minority were inclined to believe that anyone caught by such an impact would simply be destroyed. But the main school of thought was that they'd undergo a time transfer but might come out at the other end alive. By way of evidence, adherents to the majority view would point out that-assuming the vague reports were accurate-it seemed that animals coming theother direction-so to speak-came through it fairly intact. It would help, of course, if the authorities would allow anyone except their own scientists to have access to the remains that had appeared at Grantville. But that whole area, very soon after the impact, had been declared a national security zone. The same sort of tight security had been clamped down around it that you'd expect to find at weapons test sites and top secret installations. Richard's opinion was that all the existing hypotheses were simply rampant speculation. They needed hard evidence before they could do anything more than suck theories out of their thumbs. Margo brought the car to a halt. One of the officers standing by the police car parked in such a way as to bar the road started coming their way. Richard leaned toward Margo and said softly,